My Life Of Evasion

23. The Dark Side Totally Doesn't Have Cookies

Chapter 23

The Dark Side Totally Doesn't Have Cookies

 

 

Two days had passed and I hadn’t even made it out of my room.  No one was forcing me to, though.  They only came in when they thought that it would be good for me to eat something or just to check on me.  Brielle and Sophie were the ones to do this mostly, staying with me just to see if I wanted to talk.  I did, though not very much.

Vince’s name was all over the news.  It was pretty much a worldwide manhunt, as it should have been.  There were a few sightings of him, though he’d gotten away before anyone could get there.  But he was going to be caught.  I just knew it.

As for news on Max, they’d found the car, though there wasn’t a body inside.  They had gotten it out of the water and were investigating.  They said that, unlike what Max had told me, he should have easily been able to get out.  He wasn’t stuck under the wheel like he’d led me to believe.  The seatbelt, unlike mine, wasn’t even stuck so that he had to cut his way out of it.  It was as if he could have just unbuckled, opened the car door, and swam up after I did. 

But he didn’t. 

Which made me think of one thing:  he could have still been alive. 

But if he was still alive, why hadn’t he come back? 

I knew I couldn’t get my hopes up, though.  I couldn’t make myself think that he was still alive.  What if I did and they ended up finding his body somewhere downstream?  I think that would have been worse. 

But now, I was waking up in the middle of the afternoon, a tray of food sitting on the table next to the bed.  I couldn’t bring myself around to eat, though, so I just stood up and walked to the window that looked out over the street. 

The thing was, a black SUV parked across the street caught my attention for some reason.  It looked…odd…just sitting there in front of the restaurant on the opposite side of the street from our hotel.  Through the windshield I could see people sitting in the front, but the other windows were tinted so dark that I couldn’t see through the others. 

The front passenger side door opened then and a man in a suit stepped out.  It wasn’t until he looked up, right at me though I was on the third floor, that I realized who it was.

Vince. 

His smile was apparent as he continued looking up at me as he reached in his pocket, pulling out his cell phone.

Just a moment later, Max’s phone, which he’d left on the table beside the bed the night of the crash, started to ring, vibrating against the wooden surface.  Looking back at it and then back at Vince on the street, he held his up toward me before putting it back to his ear.  I walked over toward the table where the phone sat, picked it up, and pressed the answer icon on the screen just as I stepped back up to the window. 

“Well, hello there, Calliope,” Vince said on the phone as he smiled up at me from the street.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He laughed and I could see him step back toward the back door of his SUV.  “I was just calling to set up a meeting with you.  I’ve got something…that you’ll probably be wanting back.”

As I watched him, he reached for the handle on the back door and opened it up.  My breath caught in my throat when the person in the back stepped out, looking alive and healthy besides the cut on his forehead.  When Max's eye’s lifted to mine, I couldn’t help it when my jaw dropped open.